Synopsis

Description

The functions
asprintf()
and
vasprintf()
are analogs of
sprintf(3)
and
vsprintf(3),
except that they allocate a string large enough to hold the output
including the terminating null byte (aq\0aq),
and return a pointer to it via the first argument.
This pointer should be passed to
free(3)
to release the allocated storage when it is no longer needed.

Return Value

When successful, these functions return the number of bytes printed,
just like
sprintf(3).
If memory allocation wasn't possible, or some other error occurs,
these functions will return -1, and the contents of
strp
is undefined.

Conforming To

These functions are GNU extensions, not in C or POSIX.
They are also available under *BSD.
The FreeBSD implementation sets
strp
to NULL on error.

See Also

Colophon

This page is part of release 3.80 of the Linux
man-pages
project.
A description of the project,
information about reporting bugs,
and the latest version of this page,
can be found at
http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.

License & Copyright

Copyright (C) 2001 Andries Brouwer
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Text fragments inspired by Martin Schulze .